India noncommittal on joining US-led Indo-Pacific Economic Framework

India on Thursday refrained from committing itself to joining the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), which the United States President Joe Biden would launch during his visit to Tokyo next week both for a bilateral visit to Japan as well as for the summit of the Quad.

Though the government formally announced Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s participation in the second in-person summit of the four-nation coalition, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) in New Delhi stated that the US proposal for the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) was being studied.

“This is an initiative by the United States. We have received the details of it and we are examining it,” Arindam Bagchi, the spokesperson of the MEA, told journalists.

He made the comment hours after the White House formally confirmed that Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida would jointly launch the IPEF during the US president’s visit to Tokyo. Biden will be joined by the leaders from a number of Indo-Pacific partners (of the US), “from Down Under to Southeast Asia to Northeast Asia”, the US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said in Washington DC.

Though the IPEF is not exactly a Free Trade Agreement, it is being projected as an instrument for the US to step up its economic engagements with the countries in Asia, particularly the ones in the Indo-Pacific region, where it is keen to counter China.

Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump had withdrawn from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement in 2017, although 11 other nations had gone ahead and inked the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) agreement in 2018.

China has been trying to take advantage of the US withdrawal from the TPP and of late even expressed interest to join the CPTPP. The communist country is also a signatory to the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) agreement. India participated in the negotiation for the RCEP but opted out of it in 2019. It was finally signed on November 15, 2020, and came into effect on January 1 this year.

Unlike CPTPP or RCEP or any other FTA, the IPEF, which the US president will launch next week, will not lower tariffs.

Sullivan on Wednesday described it as a “21st-century economic arrangement, a new model designed to tackle new economic challenges — from setting the rules of the digital economy, to ensuring secure and resilient supply chains, to managing the energy transition, to investing in clean, modern, high-standards infrastructure”.

The IPEF, however, is not going to be an initiative by the ‘Quad’, although Biden is planning to launch it on the sideline of the summit of the four-nation coalition, which India, Japan, Australia and the US launched to counter the hegemonic and expansionist aspirations of China.

Not only India, Indonesia too expressed reservations about joining the IPEF, according to the sources in New Delhi.

New Delhi in the past stonewalled the US bid to turn the Quad into a security alliance or an equivalent of NATO for the Indo-Pacific region. India insisted that the Quad should not turn overtly adversarial to China, but counter the hegemony of the communist country with a benign agenda, like development partnerships with other Indo-Pacific nations.